


tennessee

by trxshmxuth



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Blood, Body Worship, Daddy Kink, Frottage, Gore, M/M, Obsessive Behaviour, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Possessive Behaviour, Praise Kink, Rimming, Rough Sex, Serial Killer Shane, Sociopathic behaviour, Stalking, Unrequited Love, arousal from fear, axeman au, barebacking', because i'm trash but like... what's new, but uhh not really??, dubcon, fear kink, gotta build up to it, none of this real dirty shit happens in the first chapter sorry, there's... a lot, what else
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-24 02:26:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18562063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trxshmxuth/pseuds/trxshmxuth
Summary: Anonymous: If I were a serial killer I'd make you my first victim. You deserve that honour.Ryan Boogara: Why are you doing this?Anonymous: Because I love you.want that feeling when you can't breathei like the color red, so i let it bleedsomething pretty ‘bout the pain





	tennessee

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Faequill](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Faequill).



_Anonymous: Oh no. Not this again._

_Ryan Boogara: Hey, you’d be surprised at the amount of people who seriously believe in the existence of the illuminati! Did you know that a poll revealed that 28% of people believe in the possibility of a new world order??_

_Anonymous: You’re cute, for a conspiracy theorist._

That makes Ryan pause, trips him up and makes his heartbeat stutter in his chest. He flexes his fingers against the keyboard and he can’t think of of a single intelligent thing to say. 

_Ryan Boogara: Ah, thanks, I guess?_

_Anonymous: If I were a serial killer, would you notice me? Would you feature me on your blog?_

Ryan nearly gets whiplash from the sudden change of subject. It’s kind of a weird thing to say, but not the strangest thing they’ve ever talked about so he tries his best to laugh it off and pick back up on their mostly one-sided conversation about the illuminati.

A little while later, they ask again. When Ryan doesn’t immediately respond, anon continues easily, as though they’re commenting on the weather or something equally blasé. 

_Anonymous: If I were a serial killer I'd make you my first victim. You deserve that honour._

It doesn’t take long for Ryan to block them, then subsequently freak the fuck out. He blocks anonymous on every possible social media website and feels a little better about the situation. 

His admirer isn’t so easily thwarted though, and Ryan continues to receive different iterations of the same types of serial killer questions. He updates the blog less and less, stops posting videos altogether. He wipes his instagram and makes it private, does the same with his facebook but still anonymous persists.

______

It's been months since the first time anonymous had so outwardly expressed their truest feelings. There’s a chill in the air that has absolutely nothing to do with the coming threat of winter and everything to do with the bruises under Ryan’s eyes, the exhaustion that drapes over his soul like a lead blanket, heavy and smothering. He hasn’t slept well in weeks and his grades are slipping but those are the least of his worries.

_Ryan Boogara: Why are you doing this?_

He’s currently sitting in his dorm room, cross-legged on the bed that doesn’t see him sleep anymore, surrounded by darkness with his scuffed-up laptop perched precariously in his lap. Ryan’s back is pressed against the freezing cinder block wall and it feels more like prison than university. Always had, in a funny sort of way. It’s not funny anymore. 

The only light in the room is the glow that’s coming from the laptop, eerie and ethereal in the unnatural silence of the witching hour. He scrubs his hands over his face and through his hair in an act of exhausted frustration and his hands come to hover above the keyboard, unsure. Ryan’s hands curl themselves into fists as they shake and he has to focus with every ounce of his being to open them again and rest his shaking palms on the bed on either side of him. 

He’s breathing unevenly, breaths shaky and stuttering in and out of existence. His chest is rattling with cold and the ellipses are still marching. Whoever’s on the other end of this conversation is still typing, has been for a while. Sometimes the dots will pause, disappear as though his boogeyman has deleted whatever they’ve typed in the past few seconds. Whether it’s because they’re struggling to find the correct words or for some other reason, Ryan isn’t sure.

He’s not sure he wants to know. The dots have disappeared again and Ryan’s on edge.

______

The old school house was cold and noisy in the creepiest way possible. Beams were black with dry rot and white-yellow paint peeled from every possible surface. It looked like the house was shedding, flaking away layers of its past to lie in piles at Ryan’s feet.

His breath came out in uneven clouds, white puffs that hung eerily in the darkness momentarily before dissipating altogether and his hands shook where he gripped a torch and camcorder in either. The torchlight shone weakly through the darkness in front of him before it consumed the thin beam altogether, leaving only shadows and monsters, and he swallowed harshly before turning the camcorder to face himself.

“F-fuck,” He was shivering so violently that his teeth chattered loudly, making it difficult to speak. “Th-this is the Epsom sc-school house in New H-Hampshire which w-was opened in 18-1834, where a school t-teacher alleg-allegedly abused and killed s-s-s-several students.”

He turned the camcorder back around and began to carefully make his way through the darkness. He heard a thump in the other room and jumped, whirling around so fast that he went lightheaded for a moment.

“Shit! Wh-what was that?” His voice came out as a harsh whisper and Ryan, in that moment, desperately wished that there was someone else with him but he hadn’t really made many friends at university yet. He’d been branded as the weird, paranormal-loving conspiracy theorist on campus almost as soon as he’d arrived. The few friends Ryan had managed to make had gone home for the long thanksgiving weekend like normal, sane people. Ryan had planned a three-day road trip that would take him to several of the most haunted school buildings on the East coast because he was apparently insane and enjoyed mental torture.

“There hav-have been reports of v-voices being he-heard and ph-physical encounters here. S-s-some people have e-even reported having objects t-thrown at t-them,” Ryan shuffled forward and frantically looked around himself, desperately hoping that nothing else would happen. “Is-is anyone here? Was th-that noise made by s-someone here?” 

There was a moment of unnatural silence. “H-hello?” Ryan somehow felt even colder than before and he straightened, muscles taut and ready to bolt. 

It briefly felt as though a breeze had drafted into the room, though the night outside was still and serene. Ryan took a deep breath and opened his mouth to say something else when― _“R...y...an. H...lp…....s”_.

Ryan let out a shriek and a string of curses―“Fuck, holy shit oh my god jesus christ, what the fuck?!”―and whirled around. He shone his torch into the darkness around him and desperately fought the urge to hightail it out of the old school house. 

“I-I’m pretty s-sure I just heard a voice. It w-was right n-next to my ear! I’m s-seriously f-freaking out, fuck.” The camcorder was back on him with a nice close-up of his terrified face, eyes wide with the inevitable onset of hysteria and panic that he always worked himself into.

As he took a deep breath and panned the camera slowly around the decrepit schoolhouse, Ryan found himself simultaneously hoping for more interaction and dreading the possibility that he wasn’t actually in the building alone. He continued to ask questions and prompt the ghosts when necessary but it seemed as though they had left or at least become disinterested in his presence.

He was disappointed at the end of the night when the sun began to shine through the grimy windows of the schoolhouse, watery and orange, but he also found himself relieved as he packed up what few pieces of amateur equipment he had and took his leave. He thanked the spirits for allowing him to investigate and hurried back to his car, eager to get on the road again.

______

The Epsom schoolhouse and other haunted sites from that road trip started a landslide for Ryan, who had diligently edited the videos and uploaded them to youtube and his newly minted paranormal blog instead of completing his pre-term assignments. The sacrifice was completely worth it when the comments and likes and shares began to roll in, people who were just as excited as he was about the existence of life beyond the grave.

Some people even left comments pointing out things―noises, growls, _words_ ―that Ryan had missed completely. It was both exhilarating and vindicating at once and left Ryan elated, floating high on the camaraderie of others who simply believed.

What began as a whim, as Ryan blundering his way through some creepy locations before the start of term because he simply had nothing better to do and no friends to entertain him became his life from that point on. The blog became a sensation, with thousands of followers who interacted with Ryan on twitter or left comments on his youtube videos. People who just generally supported him.

He loved it.

The blog became a source of income during his gen ed degree at the local state university and a way to keep him sane during the mundane day-to-day of lectures that didn’t interest him at all. The amount of traffic that his blog generated on a daily basis was more than enough to sustain his simple dorm life through unobtrusive ad revenue and polls. 

He eventually branched out, wrote about his other interests―serial killers, conspiracy theories, alien encounters. His small fanbase loved it, supported or argued with everything he wrote. His blog interactions were so consistent that he could recognize the usernames of a few regular commenters and even looked forward to the discussions that always occurred in the comment section after a post. 

Slowly, ever so slowly, Ryan felt as though he was finally shaping a purpose for himself, as though he had a solid plan for his life. Or at least―he had finally discovered a way to channel his passion

Until someone discovered _him_.

The comments began innocently enough. Words strung together in harmless sentences that said things like ‘you make me laugh’ or ‘i was afraid that you weren’t going to upload this week’. Sentences that were a little strange, sure, but nothing too bad compared to the other shit he’d seen on the internet. Whoever it was, they were always the first person to comment when he posted a new video or published a new blog post. They were always anonymous―even their youtube username was Anon, something that had made Ryan snort and roll his eyes at first. 

Ryan always did his best to respond to comments when he first started. He wanted to show people how much he truly appreciated their enthusiasm for what he was doing, wanted to acknowledge how much they meant to him. Others would always respond, would usually humour him with a short conversation. Some people sent long-winded, passionate paragraphs about their own supernatural encounters, but no matter what Ryan said, Anon would never reply. 

He didn’t think anything of it until he added the chat feature to his blog. It was something that people could use if they had questions, comments, accusations, anything to say about his posts and videos. Sometimes he used it as a sort of real-time way to communicate with his followers on-location while he was filming. Most of the time, people used it to tell him about haunted places around their locale, places that Ryan always marked on his map, always made a promise to visit. 

Lately, however, Anon had become bolder, had begun using the chat feature to speak with Ryan. The conversations had been normal, in the beginning, had even been enjoyable. Anon was a skeptic, it turned out, and they had conversations―arguments, heated debates, friendly challenges, intellectual duels―long into the hours of the night. Conversations that had Ryan wheezing with laughter, chest swelling with happiness. 

Then something changed. Shifted, slightly, so slightly that Ryan didn’t notice at first. Something stygian and slimy, coated in darkness and fear had slithered into the conversations, had nestled deep into the words and letters on the screen and dripped venom that tasted like danger and death. 

The conversations suddenly left Ryan cold, breathless with anxiety that clattered around his chest, his throat, his mind. Words began to slip into sentences that weren’t quite right, weren’t just friendly banter or semi-professional interest. 

Words heavy with meaning.

Heavy with feeling.

Sentences that made Ryan feel like he was drowning, suffocating in the shadow of it all.

______

_Anonymous: Because I love you._

Ryan lets out a choking sob and slams the laptop shut. He throws it across the room and flinches when it cracks hard against the opposite wall. It sounds like bones snapping and crumbling into nothing.

The darkness feels like it’s trying to swallow him alive and Ryan can’t seem to breathe around the panic in his chest. His eyes are burning and the moon hangs in the sky like an eye, watching him through the slats in the blinds that cover the single window in his room. 

He feels like an inmate in a cell. He feels like a man on death row. He feels like he can’t draw enough oxygen, like his breaths are too shallow to draw in the air he needs, like the night rings silent around him, mocking and deafening loud in its reticence. 

He feels like prey.

Ryan doesn’t sleep that night, doesn’t move an inch from the island of his bed. When watery sunlight finally slithers its way into the room, Ryan’s movements are in a mechanical echo of his usual morning routine. He unfolds his legs and slips from the bed, stumbling from the pins and needles in his numb limbs. When he brushes his teeth and looks in the mirror, the man looking back at him is a distant ghost, too pale and haggard looking to be himself.

He throws up in the toilet and has to brush his teeth again afterward, but he ends up feeling moderately better and a little more himself, shaken back into his bones by the uncomfortable sweat and retch of sickness.

He puts on his cap and gown, walks across the graduation stage later that day and smiles when they hand him his diploma, grins widely and proudly for the cameras everywhere and his hands are steady but his mind is on the dancing ellipses and the shattered remains of his laptop in a crypt-like dorm room. 

The minute the graduation ceremony is over Ryan goes back to his dorm, packs the entirety of his measly possessions into two cardboard boxes and high-tails it for New Orleans, acceptance letter from Tulane University clutched in his hands. 

The blog sits, abandoned, and slowly fades from memory along with anonymous, another ghost of the internet. Ryan finds a job DJing at a rotation of clubs on the weekends between classes at the university and it’s not like it was before with the blog and the youtube channel but he’s content, fine with the anonymity of flipping switches and adjusting sliders in the darkness of a city full of people.

He finds that he enjoys the heady feeling of holding the atmosphere of an entire building in the palm of his hand. He begins to mix his own beats, creates a bizarre mix of EDM and electroswing that Now Orleans loves, makes a name for himself in the self-contained club scene.

Life goes on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello yes  
> this is that Filthy™ Gay™ axeman au that i've been talking about for like two years now  
> ... finally
> 
> sorry i'm garbage with no discipline
> 
> i don't think faequill has an ao3 but i owe a lot to them  
> in terms of beta reading, idea hashing and general support  
> so, thanks  
> it means a lot to me


End file.
